Thoughts from a Lab Rat

For years, people have used adulterants or masking agents to hide their illicit drug use in their urine. These products are readily available at local health and vitamin stores and online. The purpose of an adulterant is to mask or dilute a particular substance, usually illicit drugs or alcohol. While the effectiveness has been questionable, many clinics are now using adulterant tests which can detect the chemicals used in adulterants. So, be forewarned. Not only are they a waste of money since few actually work, using one can also get you banned from a clinic as having a positive adulterant test is the same as a positive illicit drug test.

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The Informed Consent and rules forms are probably the most important documents you will sign before participating in a clinical research study. These forms outlines the drug(s) that you will be taking, the dosage amounts, how many times you will dose, possible and known side-effects, procedures that will be done for screening, procedures that will be done during the study, payment information and the rights and expectations of research volunteers. Yes, volunteers. Though you are getting paid, you are still volunteering to be in the study and thus can leave any time even if it means getting paid less. I find that most of the problems subjects have during a study have been clearly outlined in the informed consent and rules forms. If you know that you have a problem with any of the study procedures or rules, then you should not participate in the study. As I have touched on before, the rules are there for a reason. To ensure that the study is carried out as the sponsor has requested and to ensure the safety of the participants. So before you participate in a study, ready the informed consent and rules forms carefully. You have the opportunity to ask questions during the screening and at anytime during the study but once you are in the study, you are expected and required to follow the rules and procedures of the study and clinic.

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Testees premièred on the FX channel on Oct 9th. I missed it but will try to watch it online somewhere. The show is a comedy about 2 roommates who work as test subjects for a company called Testico. I’m sure it’s miles off from what actually happens in research and probably covers other aspects of research rather than just medicine.

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While clinics try to provide as much entertainment and activities for subjects to do during their long stays, most subjects eventually get bored and find themselves reading the phonebook or making new games using Monopoly, Jenga and checkers. We live in great times right now with new respectable laptops selling for cheaper than used and refurbished laptops. Nowadays, you can go to Best Buy almost any day of the week and buy a new laptop for under $600. Every other week or so, they have at least 1 laptop in the $400 to $500 range. And these are decent laptops. If all you want to do is play some lite games, surf the web and watch YouTube, then these laptops will fit the bill. If you want to play some of the heavier games then you would need a better, slightly more expensive laptop. If your going to buy a new laptop, you should get one that has at least a dual core processor, I prefer Intel. You need at least 1 gig of ram but you will be much better off with at least 2 gigs of ram. Hard drive space is not a huge issue as most new laptops come with at least 100 gigs. If you need more space, you can always get an external USB drive with much more space than onboard storage. Almost all laptops are wide-screen which is great for watching movies. Even the basement laptops are coming with DVD burners but make sure it has one if you need one. The major down sides to the lower end laptops is that most have limited or no extra ports like HDMI, S-Video, fire-wire, blue-tooth and internal ports like PCI-express. Pretty much all laptops come with some form of wifi and LAN port for hardwire connectivity. There is also an increasing amount of mini laptops known as Netbooks that are much smaller than a laptop but usually limited on processor speed, storage and ram. If you were interested in a Netbook, I would recommend the Acer Aspire with 80 gig hd, 512/1 gig ram/Intel Atom and xp. I would avoid any netbook with any version of vista.